On the importance of setting. Can’t remember who I wrote this for. The US Coast Guard invited me to do a ridealong on cutter Alex Haley in the Bering Sea in February of 2004. I was invited to write a daily blog from the ship so the shorebound families of the crew could eyewitness as…
[for the Poisoned Pen Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206…
What a delightfully informative little book! I don’t know how they crammed so much information into just 200 pages (reminds me of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and this one doesn’t have recipes). (And why not, I ask? Hmmph.) The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar,…
Less than two hundred pages packed with information on the title subject, written in lively prose and illustrated mostly with line drawings from the times, plus a few photographs. Where else are you going find out that during the Middle Ages An amusement gallery was sometimes run in conjunction with a medieval zoo…In these galleries…
Cahill is determined to redeem the Middle Ages from the likes of William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire) and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). On the contrary, Cahill writes The reputation of the Middle Ages for thuggish cruelty is largely (if not wholly) undeserved. which I find a bit…
A wealth of detail in this you-are-there look at life in medieval England. Just dipping in at random: When you draw closer to the city walls you will see the great gatehouse…And then you notice the smell. Four hundred yards from the city gate, the muddy road you are folowing crosses a brook. As you…
Lavishly illustrated, which initially led me to regard this book with some suspicion, but in the end lots of interesting information of harem life and history. That the author has a family history that reaches back to the seraglio and that she has included a photo of her great-uncle with his odalisque is convincing in…
Read more You could buy seven women slaves for 1,000 to 2,000 kurush. One horse cost 5,000.
The Knights Templar began in 1113 when Frankish knight Hugues de Payen volunteered his and nine (unless it was thirty) other knights’ services to King Baldwin of Jerusalem to guard the safety of pilgrims traveling from where they landed on the coast to the Holy Sepulcher. Unless they were founded in Easter of 1119, when…
Read more Unless they were guilty of idolatry, heresy and sodomy as charged.
Excellent overview of a people, place and time, even if I do suspect that Lewis is a wee bit undiscriminating in her love of her subject. It begins with a brief history In 1390, however, Sultan Bayezid began his conquests in Asia Minor. His Muslim troops were unwilling to fight their co-religionists, whom, anyway, they…
Read more Sounds like the direct ancestor of ransomware, doesn’t it?
What, you thought napalm was a new thing? This book will disabuse your mind of that notion pronto. According to Mayor, mankind has been thinking up new and more horrible ways to spread terror and kill more people faster since before Alexander. Beehive bombs. Snake bombs. Poisonous spider bombs. Naphtha bombs. Arrows poisoned with snake…